After the Game

We spill into the city like members of a congregation leaving a domed church, our footsteps, clapping down the concrete landings, resounding the benediction:may your come-from-behind win over the Yankees give you peace, may this moment keep you warm deep into the spring night, and may your road ahead be filled with victories like this one, forever and ever, amen. Fireworks cast flashes of yellow and blue across the shifting crowds. We divide into lines and veer off in search of our way home. I follow my friend through a human maze, across intersections and around corners—each block grows quieter than the last, each block thins the crowd. We are almost alone when he turns to me and says that his dad died two years ago today, that this is the second anniversary of his passing.

The first Major League game he attended was in ’86. His dad brought him to the Dome for a match up between the Twins and the A’s. Puckett batted for the cycle, Blyleven threw his 3,000th strikeout, and to top it off, the third base ump tossed him a game ball between innings. His dad, who grew up watching Mick and Koufax, told him that watching Puck was just as good. Years later, only weeks after Puckett was inducted into the Hall of Fame, they traveled together to see the hallowed grounds of Cooperstown. Three years after that, his dad was gone.

Tonight, as we walk beyond the reach of the Dome and its crowd, he says to me, “Grief is not as painful as regret, and dads were invented to go to baseball games with, and as long as long as your dad’s still around, there’s nowhere else you should be.”

("After the Game" is an excerpt of "Easter Baseball," an essay I wrote in 2006.)